Four women died in Kiel, the port city on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein, between 1983 and 1987. They were aged between nineteen and forty. Three of them worked at the same premises. Each was strangled, in the course of an argument and after sex, by the same man, Alwin Neumann.
He was not brought to trial until 1998, eleven years after the last death. The Landgericht Kiel convicted him on all four counts of murder at a single trial and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The available record does not say how the case was solved so long afterward, whether through new forensic evidence, a confession or a witness.
German court reporting withholds the surnames of defendants and victims as a matter of settled practice, and the four women are not named in any published account. They were named in court. Neither the judgment nor any detailed contemporary report is accessible, and nothing is recorded about their lives, where they worked, or what connected them to him beyond the place three of them shared.